Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Walter Lang | The Desk Set

free association

by Douglas Messerli

Phoebe
and Henry Ephron (writers, based on a play by William Marchant), Walter Lang
(director) /1957

I
have never been able to understand why the 1957 Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy
vehicle The Desk Set has been treated
so unkindly by numerous critics. As the Time
Out critic observes: “Most reviewers agreed at the time that Hepburn got
far more out of this mere bauble of a sex comedy…than it deserved.”

The Kanins, who wrote Hepburn’s and
Tracy’s Adam’s Rib, were generally
wittier writers than the Ephrons, but their shrill version of feminism in their
1949 film, where Hepburn (as Amanda Bonner) takes sexual equality to ridiculous
heights by demanding an athletically-gifted woman lift her opposing-lawyer
husband over her head. Similarly absurd is Ring Lardner’s and Michael Kanin’s
presentation of Hepburn (as Tess Harding) in Woman of the Year of 1942 as a brilliantly multi-lingual internationalist
who adopts a Greek boy more as a symbolic gesture than as a someone who she
might actually wish to love and nurture. In both of these National Film
Registry movies, the errant Hepburn is forced to retreat to the position of a
housewife, particularly in Woman of the
Year, where she slinks back into the kitchen in an attempt to make waffles
(disasterously) to appease her ignored husband.

In The
Desk Set, on the other hand, Hepburn (as Bunny Watson) is beloved by
Richard Sumner (Tracy) primarily because
she is brilliant and capable of witty conversation. The only retreat she is
asked to make in the Ephrons’ script (based on the 1955 Broadway play by
William Marchant) is from her apparent fear and disdain of his EMARAC*
computer, which Sumner utilizes to propose to her and which, accordingly,
Watson quickly comes to embrace, while recognizing it, nonetheless, as an equal
suitor for her fiancée’s future love. And surely the straight-speaking Joan
Blondell, Dina Merrill, and the other working women of the network reference
department do far more for women’s rights than does the confused and abused
housewife, Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday); Mike (Gig Young) is a far superior
foil for Sumner’s attention than the evidently gay song-writer, Kip, played by
David Wayne in the 1949 comedy. If Stevens and Cukor are simply better
directors than The Desk Set’s Walter
Lang (and I’m not certain I might effectively argue that position), he makes up
for it in the wonderful late evening pajama-party-dinner scene and the homey
sequence in the up-stairs stacks of the reference library, wherein, for some of
the few moments of any Hepburn-Tracy film, the couple actually do seem to be radiantly happy in each
other’s presence.

Although both Woman of the Year and Adam’s
Rib tackle important topical subjects—the equality of the sexes and World
War II internationalism—The Desk Set
takes on an equally vital topic concerning the future of human workers in an
age of increasing dependence upon computers—a topic, in fact, slightly ahead of
its time. Seldom has a film more specifically honed in on the issues of “the
age of anxiety” than in The Desk Set,
where even the mention of an Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical
Calculator sends employees rushing off to their union offices and the legal
department’s Smithers into a near nervous-breakdown. Even the commonsensical
Watson (a kind of would-be detective in her attempts to track down Sumner’s
reason for having turned up in their “little iron lung”) expresses her fears
that such computers might ultimately make the human race obsolete.

Fortunately the computer’s vaguely
Turing-like mathematician-creator (he is after all, a man who adds things up, a
“sumner”) is a fairly bumbling and loveable fool who, apparently disinterested
in opposite sex—at least early on in this tale—wears different colored socks,
confuses the days of the week, and generally doesn’t give a fig for the
accoutrements of power and wealth. In short, is he a lot like the absent-minded
“prof” as friends described Turing. His gradually growing attraction to the
Head of the network reference department is also a bit like Turing’s attraction
to Joan Clarke: her intelligence makes her easy to talk to, and the domesticity
she offers is appealing. His real love—again a bit like Turing’s hand-built
home computer, named after his beloved childhood friend, Christopher—is, as
Watson describes Sumner’s machine, Emily EMARAC! After all, this relationship
has to, at least, pretend it is exclusively heterosexual—although that fact
doesn’t stop Bunny from wondering whether Sumner might not be the marrying kind
(“Don’t you like women?” she queries him in her intimate conversation with him
in the library stacks).

I doubt whether, in fact, the
original playwright or the Ephrons knew anything about Alan Turing, but it can’t
be simply coincidental, surely, that when a telephone caller Sumner answers,
asks him to name Santa’s reindeer, the computer creator answers first with the
names of five of the seven dwarfs (Dopey, Sneezy, Grouchy, Happy, and Sleepy)
before finishing up with Rudolph and Blitzen. Given what I’ve noted above about
Turing’s own reactions to Snow White,
it does indeed seem difficult not to suspect the reference here is to the
British mathematician.

Similarly, Watson’s discovery that Sumner
spent the war in Greenland (a far bigger, and less green island than England,
but still suggestive of Turing’s isolated existence at Bletchley) doing
something so secret that even she couldn’t track it down, again hints at the possibility of the
author’s knowledge of Turing.

The film takes the relationship no further,
and it is doubtful that, except for a few individuals, the audiences of the day
would ever have made any connection with the British genius. Indeed, it doesn’t
matter whatsoever in the story—except that the Turing machine of this tale is
just what the mathematician predicted it might become: a machine with an intelligence
that makes it, at first, very difficult to distinguish from a human being.
Emily EMARAC, at least as presented in The
Desk Set, appears, in “her” “fits” of bad behavior, likely to continue to
win Sumner’s heart, even if Watson has fully captured his admiration and
affection. As Watson, herself,
expresses the situation: her experience has been that most of the elderly men
she has seen who appear to be cruising as they circle the block, are simply
looking for a parking space. I suppose those who read The Desk Set primarily as a sex comedy, might find it somewhat
disappointing. But as a statement of the future of human species interactions
with machines it is quite fascinating and truly forward looking, particularly
when recall that Turing committed suicide only a year before the production of
the play. Better to have a computer in a world where, as Bunny Watson
recognizes, it is necessary to “associate many things with many things.”

*The
running titles of this film spell the computer’s name as EMMARAC, but have
consistently referred to it as EMARAC in connection with the words the initials
refer to, choosing to also write electromagnetic as one word.